fairy-tales and poetry he poured contempt. He read the "Riddle of the
Universe" and the "Kritic of Pure Reason," orating them to Marcella as
they worked together in the harvest field. She did not even understand
their terminology. He had a quite unreasoning belief in the stolidly
utilitarian of German philosophers and laid siege to Marcella's
mysticism, but after he went back one day she discovered a box of her
mother's poetry books and so Tennyson, Shelley and Keats shone into her
life and, reading an ancient copy of "David and Bethsaibe," she gathered
that the Bible Aunt Janet read sourly had quite human possibilities.
This box of books was her first glimpse of a world that was not a long
tale of stern fights; it was her first glimpse of something softly
sensuous instead of austere and natural and passionate.

Marcella never knew quite how her folks came to live at the farm; it had
happened when she was three years old and she took for granted her world
of crumbling, decayed splendours. Hunchback Wullie had told her that
the old grey house on Ben Grief used to be her home, and that the lands
all about had belonged to her father. But they were his no longer and
she was forbidden to pass the old grey house, or even to speak of it.

Andrew Lashcairn, Aunt Janet, two women servants and a man who never
seemed to have any wages for their work lived with Marcella at the farm.
The man and Aunt Janet planted things in the garden, but on the poor
land, among the winds they never grew very well. Oats grew, thin and
tough, in the fields, and were ground to make the daily porridge;
sometimes one of the skinny fowls that picked and pecked its hungry way
through life round about the cattle pen and the back door was killed for
a meal; sometimes Marcella ran miles away up Ben Grief when one of the
lean pigs screamed its life out in a stream of blood in the yard. She
used to feel sorry for the beasts about the farm; the cows seemed to